We’re still on holiday — this week in France, sharing a villa in Gascony with three other couples — and our holidaymaking has become so prolonged, entering its third week now for reasons I can’t rehearse again here but partly having to do with a mystery pregnancy, that I think we may have finally discovered the answer to the age-old question of why we shouldn’t all sell up in Britain and then move to a genial Gascon village and work from home on broadband while quaffing cheap pomerol and nibbling foie gras. Why not? Well after just two weeks, Mr W has turned into a holiday alcoholic.

It happened so quickly and painlessly, too — almost as if he were drugged. What began with an ordinary pub lunch every day while we were in Norfolk, accompanied perhaps by two civilised pints, then stretched to 3 o’clock and three pints; and then the yardarm began to be artificially, but determinedly, raised, so that the sun started to pass beneath it at 4.30 until one day there was no division between lunch and early evening drinks. Suddenly he was “drinking through”, right up to dinner when our holiday companions would have got their kids to bed and would begin proper drinking, attacking bottles of red wine like marathon runners grabbing cups of water.

Consequently Mr W, who is normally quite a moderate boozer, is drunk from 11 in the morning to 11 at night. And he loves it. In fact he can’t see any downsides at all.

Indeed whenever I confront him, he is indignant: “What?” he will reply. “Am mon ’oliday! I’s just enjoying ’self! An’way, Guinness [or red wine] is health drink! Didshu know — did shu know? — that when Rolling Shtones were on tour, or was it on holiday, or was it rehab? — when they weren’t allowed any booze at all — except Guinness! Because it is a health drink! A health drink!”

And if I’m really honest, I’m not that far behind him. And the reason, I’ve decided, is that unlike the other couples on holiday with us, we don’t have children to act as a natural brake upon boozy lunches and to keep us honest until 7 o’clock. Although I’m really not sure that we drink that much more than the parents in total; their single-mindedness, once they’ve begun drinking, can be impressive.

If they are of a single mind with regard to booze, the surprise matter of contention between parents on this holiday has been — not children’s bedtime, or nap time, or even meal times — but whether said events should take place according to the British clock or the French one. Frankly this is a refinement of child scheduling that I’d never come across before and initially I thought was a joke.

Nevertheless, at first one, and then two, sets of parents were so fierce in their desire to preserve the sacred routine of their toddlers that the whole house now runs on two schedules, French and British, with the result that we are now constantly having conversations along the following lines:

“What time shall we have supper?”

“Children’s or adults’?”

“Adults’.”

“Eight o’clock British?”

“Nine French? OK.”

The other innovation of this holiday has been our invention of Holiday Mr & Mrs. Played informally during normal conversation and without a quizmaster or formal set of questions, the aim is to not inadvertently reveal your complete ignorance of an important fact about your own spouse/partner eg, “Mr W loves pistachios . . .” “No, I don’t. I’m allergic to them.” Honestly, it’s a much harder game than you imagine and the winners were a couple wherein the husband had no idea how long they’d been married. Three years? Five? Seven? A deep pall of silence fell over the dinner table.

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